


The Once and Future King

by owl_coffee



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men (Original Timeline Movies)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Plastic prison, Solitary Confinement, X2: X-Men United (2003), implied past Erik/Charles, implied past Erik/Raven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 10:03:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15337509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owl_coffee/pseuds/owl_coffee
Summary: Charles has sent him a present. Because this is Charles, it's utterly impractical - a first-edition copy of 'The Once and Future King' by T. H. White. Erik has never read it, himself. In happier days Erik remembers Charles reading passages of the children's story aloud to them, in love with the flowery English phrases and T. H. White's pacifism. Mystique used to roll her eyes at it, another one of her brother's affectations.A memory floats up, unbidden. Erik lying on a couch at the mansion and Charles reading to him quietly. He was half-asleep and didn't catch many words, but it was warm, lazy. Erik knew he was safe to fall asleep right there in the sitting-room because Charles would guard him, would hear if anyone came near them.Erik shakes his head to clear it.Running hands across the binding, he confirms to himself that 'The Once and Future King' contains no metal of any kind, not even a stray staple in the old spine. Erik couldn't admit the secret hope to himself until it died. But of course Charles wouldn't rescue him now. He'd put him here, after all.Erik hurls the book across the cell.





	The Once and Future King

Charles has sent him a present. Because this is Charles, it's utterly impractical - a first-edition copy of 'The Once and Future King' by T. H. White. Erik has never read it, himself. In happier days Erik remembers Charles reading passages of the children's story aloud to them, in love with the flowery English phrases and T. H. White's pacifism. Mystique used to roll her eyes at it, another one of her brother's affectations.  
  
A memory floats up, unbidden. Erik lying on a couch at the mansion and Charles reading to him quietly. He was half-asleep and didn't catch many words, but it was warm, lazy. Erik knew he was safe to fall asleep right there in the sitting-room because Charles would guard him, would _hear_ if anyone came near them.  
  
Erik shakes his head to clear it.  
  
Running hands across the binding, he confirms to himself that 'The Once and Future King' contains no metal of any kind, not even a stray staple in the old spine. Erik couldn't admit the secret hope to himself until it died. But of course Charles wouldn't rescue him now. He'd put him here, after all.  
  
Erik hurls the book across the cell.  
  
*  
  
After he's eaten dinner, plastic hospital cutlery clumsy in his hands on the cheap tray, Erik looks in the corner and sees 'The Once and Future King' again. It's splayed open, one page bent underneath itself, crumpled.  
  
Charles always hated when Erik left his books upside down.  
  
Filled with a sudden regret, Erik strides over and picks it up, smoothing out the page in his hands as best he can. There's an ugly crease in it that won't go away.  
  
The page it's open to has a paragraph which catches his eye.  
  
_The boy thought there was something wrong with him. All his life - even when he was a great man with the world at his feet - he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand. There is no need for us to try to understand it. We do not have to dabble in a place which he preferred to keep secret._  
  
Erik sighs and closes the book. Charles should have taken its advice.  
  
*  
  
Erik does his calisthenics every morning except Saturdays, before he eats anything or reads the newspaper. It's his routine. Push-ups by the bed, lifts with his plastic water bottle as the best weight he can manage, and a rapid walk between the two farthest ends of the cell fifty times. It's six paces across, five and a half if he widens his strides. He's getting older but he's not out of shape yet. If he escapes, no, when he escapes, he'll need to be fit.  
  
Erik can feel himself settling back into the deadening prison torpor, the solitary confinement gloom. Turning into a rat in a cage again, hurling itself pointlessly at the walls. But he must do something to occupy himself.  
  
*  
  
At night they dim the lights in the cell and the only true illumination is the red unblinking LEDs of the security cameras. Erik lies on the plastic bed and stares at them. He supposes he should be thankful that they dim the lights these days. Erik assumes that it's even in sync with day and night outside the cell; a dangerous assumption. The cameras are frustrating - gold circuitry, they thought of everything - nothing for him to touch, there. They are mounted on the wall with plastic nails.  
  
Erik wonders who's watching the tapes.  
  
*  
  
Erik tries to stretch out with his powers every day. He feels muffled in here, dull, like his ears are blocked or he's underwater without the touch of metal nearby. There's usually always something, loose change in someone's pockets, perhaps a filling, a piece of jewelry, the foil wrapper of a packet of cigarettes. But the guards are empty, hollow people, no metal eyelets in their shoes, no belt-buckles, no watches. Even the tiny springs inside a pair of glasses would help, but there's nothing. It makes Erik feel slightly unreal.  
  
Erik has tried to calculate the amount of metal that would set him free. Three sewing-needles would be enough, he thinks. Erik visualises how he would do it, the subtle manipulations necessary to fuse them into spheres, into discs, into blades.

*  
  
He decided on kosher meals when they asked him about it. Erik hasn't eaten this way in years, a lifetime, but he figures why not? Make them work a little harder to feed him. Make them remember who he is.  
  
Another benefit: Erik can make them wait, when they give him meat meals. Makes them apologise, promise to come back later next time. "It hasn't been six hours yet," he reminds them politely. Erik chooses when he eats, no-one else will dictate that for him.  
  
The food is bland, forgettable mush, but Erik doesn't have much of an appetite these days. Anyway, they say the kosher option is better, don't they.

*  
  
When Colonel William Stryker visits him it's a novelty, a change. Charles never comes any more, not since that first visit. Erik is conscious of being on show, of playing the captured Mutant King, proud and unconquered. Charles' damned book is poisoning his thoughts. Erik had been sitting at the desk, looking at the blue and white cover. He wasn't planning to open it.  
  
"Mr Lensherr," purrs Stryker. There's something disturbing about the man, notwithstanding his sandy little beard and plastic glasses. "Please, don't get up."  
  
Erik wasn't about to. "To what do I owe the honour?"  
  
Stryker smiles. "I wanted to ask you some questions, Mr Lensherr. Let's start with a simple one - what are the names of your mutant associates?"  
  
"Sabre-Tooth. Toad. Mystique." Erik says. "Those are the only names they care to be known by."  
  
The guard steps forward, overhead lights glinting on the transparent plastic of his baton. Mitchell Laurio. Erik has made a point of memorising all of their names. Laurio draws his baton.  
  
"Their real names," says Stryker, and he's not smiling any more.  
  
Erik gestures silently at the cameras surrounding them. There are no blind-spots in the cell, he knows. Let them beat him. The world will see how brutal humans can be; even if Stryker kills him it will advance the mutant cause.  
  
"Oh yes," says Stryker, and he snaps his fingers.  
  
The camera lights blink off.  
  
There's a sudden, violent struggle that ends with Laurio pinning Erik to the floor, baton pressed against Erik's neck. Another twist and his air will be cut off entirely. Erik's fingers scrabble at the baton, useless, he can't move. All his exercises have done him no good at all against the younger, fitter, heavier man. Erik was fooling himself to think that they ever would.  
  
"Their real names, if you please," says Stryker, conversational.  
  
"Fuck you," spits Erik, and feels the press of the baton at his neck. The edges of his vision are whiting out.  
  
"Now, now, there's no need to be aggressive. Turn him over for me." Stryker's holding something in his hand, but Erik can't make it out from his position on the floor. Erik claws desperately for Laurio's face and the guard swears, but a moment later Erik's lying on his front, face being ground into the transparent floor. Erik can see all the way down to the bottom of this pit. He can't breathe well in this position, but he still struggles when Laurio opens the zipper at the back of his smock. Erik thinks of the many potential uses of a plastic baton and tries desperately to sit up, to break loose. But the guard only exposes Erik's neck.  
  
Erik makes the mistake of relaxing for a moment. He feels a drop of something cold on the back of his neck. After a moment it burns like acid and he shouts with pain. Then a woozy numbness fills him and Erik feels himself relax unwillingly.  
  
A moment later Laurio is hauling him up from the floor, depositing him on the chair. The transparent plastic is cool underneath him, almost like metal. If it were, he would impale them, Erik muses dreamily. First the goon, then Stryker himself.  
  
"What are their names, Mr Lensherr?" asks Stryker.  
  
_Fuck you_ , thinks Erik fiercely, but finds himself speaking. "Saber-Tooth's human name was Victor Creed. I never learned Toad's name." What's happening to him? "Raven's name, my Mystique's other name is Raven Darkholme though really I always thought that might be something she made up as a child. My dear Charles is the only one who never changed his, but now all his students call him Professor X." With difficulty, Erik stills his voice which wants to spill the names of everyone he's ever known.  
  
"Interesting." Stryker says. "Tell me more about _Charles_."  
  
"He - nnnh - no," Erik manages, tongue thick in his mouth.  
  
"Give him another dose, then leave us," Stryker says to the guard. He leans closer. "Then you can tell me _all_ about it."  
  
*  
  
Erik wakes up alone and disoriented. The cameras are on again. It's as if nothing ever happened, as if he imagined Stryker coming to visit. Perhaps he did. Erik tries to recall their conversation, but all he can picture is a single image of Stryker's smiling face.  
  
Erik's neck itches.  
  
*  
  
The tea is always cold. They're afraid to give him a hot drink, thinking he'll spill it on the guard in an attack, he supposes. Erik finds himself looking forward to it every day, nevertheless, looking forward to seeing the more tolerable guards - Donner, Harris. He lingers over his tea and the newspaper, that touch of normalcy in a deeply strange place. Erik has even started reading the sports pages, something he'd usually discard instantly.  
  
Harris smiles at him when he hands over the newspaper. "Go Cubs, huh?"  
  
"Indeed."  
  
Erik notices, when he picks up the transparent mug of tea, that there are cuts in the palm of his right hand. The same on the left, when he checks. Crescent-shaped. As if - he makes the motion briefly - as if he'd been clenching his fists so hard his nails had cut the flesh.  
  
*  
  
He sets up a solitaire game of chess on the plastic board, but Erik can't concentrate on it. Something in the corner of Erik's eye keeps snagging his attention. A hand-print, faint against the glass wall above the desk. It's tinted brown, and out of some morbid curiosity Erik steps over and tastes it. Blood. His own? He can't remember how it got there, and that troubles him.  
  
He should be able to extract the metal from his own blood, in theory. There's iron in blood-cells, Erik knows that much biology. But he can't sense it, can't get deep enough, small enough. Even if he could get it out, it would be too little to make a difference, Erik thinks. A scant handful of powder.  
  
Still, he imagines drawing it out of himself, spinning it into metal lace, into filigree.  
  
*  
  
Erik has gaps in his memory. He realised this when one of the guards bringing dinner mentions Stryker's visits. Erik pretends to know all about it, but inside he's panicking. Visits? He can only remember one visit. Perhaps they're all so similar that they blend into one, but he knows that's not really true. For a man in solitary confinement every visitor is a novelty that lasts for days, the conversation something he will turn over and over in his head.  
  
Stryker's been fooling with Erik's mind somehow, fogging his memory. He knows that now, but what can he do to stop it? And what's been happening while his memory is absent?  
  
*  
  
Erik starts reading 'The Once and Future King'. He tells himself it's so that he can keep track of time. Every time Stryker and his pet guard Mitchell Laurio come to visit, if Erik's reading 'The Once and Future King' he can scratch it with his fingernail or dog-ear the page. That way he'll know how many times it's happened.  
  
He's not really reading it. Not the way Charles wants. Erik starts in the middle and works his way out to the edges, begins again from the back. Like the wizard in the book, Merlyn, always at odds with the stream of time, living his life in reverse.  
  
Erik catches himself staring at the first pages, looking for an inscription, something from Charles that would summon an ache in his chest despite his better judgement. But there's nothing, no _My Dearest Erik_ , _In Memory of Happier Times_ or even just a _From Charles Xavier_ , nothing but a blank page. Why should he be surprised every time he looks. Charles has left him in here to die.  
  
*  
  
Erik does calisthenics. _See, I will perform the movements of youth. I will defy the enormous army of age._  
  
One day on his morning 'walk' Erik hastens the pace until he's half-running across the cell and back. He can feel the danger-signs in himself but there seems to be no way to stop it, no way to slow himself down again. He wants to run until his feet blister, wants to walk outside under open skies and feel grass underneath him. Erik's feet pound beneath him as he turns, runs, turns, runs, turns, runs, turns, runs. He feels dizzy, out of breath, like he could do this forever, back and forth touching the glass walls like it's a game. But the end of the next run he slips and - SLAM - the wall hits him like a rock.  
  
Erik's lying on the ground. He can taste blood; it feels like one of his teeth is loose. He spits, levers himself up awkwardly, and sees the red lights of the security cameras, their endless unblinking stare.  
  
Erik gives them two fingers.  
  
*  
  
When Erik examines 'The Once and Future King' he realises suddenly that dozens and dozens of the pages are dog-eared. He bites the inside of his cheek, hard, to stop his eyes watering. Erik will not show weakness in front of the cameras.  
  
He decides not to count them again.  
  
*  
  
When he was a younger man, Erik did not take well to solitary confinement. He remembers punching the wall until his hands bled, stripping naked, cursing at the guards, singing too loud and out of key the songs that were echoing around his head. At the moment it's 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen' that's Erik's earworm, filling his mind until he can't concentrate on the stories in his newspaper. The damnedest thing is, he can't remember the verses, only the chorus. _Bei mir, bist du shoen, bei mir hostu heyn, bei mir, bist du einer af der welt..._ He will not, he will _not_ sing it out loud. Erik won't give them the satisfaction of thinking they've broken him.  
  
*  
  
Erik cuts himself, shaving. The ceramic blades they give him are adequate, at least he isn't forced to grow a beard, but his old-man's hands are clumsy sometimes. Erik curses as the foam is suddenly tinged pink with his blood, tries to wash off under the sink. He's used to shaving with no hands, just a straight-razor and the lazy command of his own power.  
  
In here there's no mirror, which makes doing it the slow way harder. Just the reflection in the glass walls of his prison. It's probably better that way, Erik doesn't want to see himself in this state, doesn't want to remember it.  
  
*  
  
It's a foolish notion, but Erik has started to believe that if he can understand 'The Once and Future King' well enough, Charles will come and visit him. He desperately wants Charles to visit, but at the same time would hate to see him in this condition. Better for Charles to remember a courteous, defiant man who can play a good game of chess. Handsome still, even, perhaps. You take white, I'll take black. Not this humiliating wreck.  
  
_He supported himself meanwhile on daydreams. He wanted to be the best knight in the world, so that Arthur would love him in return, and he wanted one other thing which was still possible in those days. He wanted, through his purity and excellence, to be able to perform some ordinary miracle - to heal a blind man or something like that, for instance._  
  
*  
  
Erik has found an indentation on the back of his neck. He's certain it wasn't there before. Erik doesn't wash very frequently - there's no need to give the cameras a show - but every week or two he sponges himself down at the plastic sink. To show he isn't an animal. He does it after the artificial day is over, so he at least has the illusion of privacy.  
  
Erik can't see what it is, even twisting his head to look at his dim reflection on the wall. But he can feel it with his fingers, a sore spot with raised edges. Erik runs his finger around the rim of it, carefully. It's coin-sized, round. It must be where the liquid - where the syringe -  
  
Erik feels nauseated suddenly, bends over the sink just in time. Nothing comes up, only bile. He washes out his mouth with water, dresses himself again with careful, shaking hands.  
  
*  
  
_"I'm going to count to three, and you're going to move the coin._

_One._

_Two._

_Three."_  
  
The gunshot in the dream is so loud it wakes him. Erik feels as if he just fell down a flight of stairs. He sits up in bed, panting, until a sense of reality starts to come back to him again. It's just an old bad dream. Shaw is dead.  
  
*  
  
In the newspaper, Erik reads that mutants have tried to assassinate the President. Left a dagger on the man's desk with a red ribbon tied to it saying, 'Mutant Freedom Now'.  
  
Erik winces. What a stupid gesture. What an imbecilic thing to do, if you're not going to _succeed_ at it. It just makes them into monsters to be feared and hated,  a bogey-man, can't the would-be assassin see that? Erik wonders if his younger self would agree, and thinks on balance yes. Though the young Erik would still admire the gesture, the theatricality of it, Erik's grown out of that sort of thing now.  
  
Erik knows for a fact that one of the President's friends' children is a mutant. Nothing spectacular, nothing suitable for Charles' school, just a little girl with feathers for hair. He wonders how the President feels about mutants; presumably different, now.  
  
*  
  
Erik is reading 'The Once and Future King' again.  
  
_His Word was valuable to him not only because he was good, but also because he was bad.  It is the bad people who need to have principles to restrain them. For one thing, he liked to hurt people. It was for the strange reason that he was cruel, that the poor fellow never killed a man who asked for mercy, or committed a cruel action which he could have prevented. One reason why he fell in love with Guenever was because the first thing he had done was to hurt her. He might never have noticed her as a person, if he had not seen the pain in her eyes._  
  
The security cameras blink off, one by one. Erik feels unutterably weary and spent, doomed to relive the same events over and over. Erik folds over the tip of the page as Mitchell Laurio walks into the room.  
  
Erik swallows, tries to speak casually. "Laurio, how long can we keep this up?"  
  
The guard smirks and reaches down to close Erik's book with a snap. "How long is your sentence?"  
  
"Forever."  
  
"Not necessarily forever, Mr Lensherr," says Stryker, coming into the room. "Just until I've got all that I need."  
  
"Mr Stryker, how kind of you to visit," says Erik, turning in his plastic chair. "Did you come back to make sure the tax-payers' dollars are keeping me comfortable?" He attempts a smile but it disappears when he sees the syringe in Stryker's hand.  
  
The guard strikes him down with the plastic baton and holds him there, pinned and struggling facing the plastic desk - plastic all plastic nothing to hold onto no metal nothing here - and he feels the cold touch of the liquid on his neck again.  
  
It's sickeningly familiar.  
  
Erik's fingers relax on the desk. Dully he hears Stryker tell the guard he can go.  
  
"Mr Lensherr," Stryker raises Erik's head off the desk and props him upright in the plastic chair. "I'd like to have one final talk about the house that Xavier built. And the machine called Cerebro."  
  
*  
  
Erik opens his eyes and finds himself lying on the bed. Everything has the texture of a daydream, something unreal. The transparent plastic cage makes him feel like a fly caught in amber, embedded in it. His neck itches.  
  
Erik can't help humming aloud the tune still echoing in his head. " _Fil sheyne meydlech hobn shoyn gevolt, nemen mich, un fun zey alle oysgeklibn, hob ich nor dich -_ " He tries to stop, manages it after another few bars but still feels it trickle on and on inside his head, unstoppable.  
  
_I could say 'Bella, bella' even say 'Wunderbar', each language only helps me tell you, how grand you are ..._  
  
Erik squeezes his eyes shut.  
  
*  
  
The doors hiss open, but it's not Stryker today. It's Charles, it's Charles Charles Charles Charles.  
  
"Charles Xavier," Erik breathes. "And have you come to rescue me," he quips, trying for lightness.  
  
"Sorry, Erik, not today," Charles replies in the same tone. If nothing else is left, he can always at least reliably manage to fill Charles' face with that regretful expression.  
  
"To what do I owe the pleasure?" Erik tries to sound normal, dignified.  
  
Charles waits until the glass door hisses shut. "The assassination attempt on the President, what do you know about it?" Charles is serious, playing the Professor to the hilt today.  
  
Erik wonders how Charles can imagine he's behind that. It's flattering, really. The question must be for form's sake, Charles must already be rifling through Erik's head, sifting through the filing-cabinets of his mind until he finds what he wants. And then he'll leave again.  
  
"Nothing." Erik unprops his head from his hand. "Only what I read in the papers." Erik visualises a metal filing-cabinet slamming shut on Charles' fingers, but the man doesn't betray any expression. Erik looks directly at him for the first time. "You really shouldn't have to _ask_ , Charles." It comes out more bitter than he intended.  
  
"What's happened to you?" Charles sounds surprised, but doesn't enter Erik's head. His maddening decision to no longer read Erik's mind now the helmet is gone is so hypocritical, so - Charles.  
  
"I've had frequent visits from William Stryker." Erik's smile has no warmth left in it. "You remember him, don't you?"  
  
Charles wheels closer. "William Stryker."  
  
"His son, Jason, was once a student of yours wasn't he?"  
  
"Yes, years ago." Charles nods, his expression troubled. "Unfortunately, I wasn't able to help him. At least, not in the way his father wanted."  
  
Erik stands up. Tries to visualise a blank wall to keep Charles out. "And now you think that taking in the Wolverine will make up for your failure with Stryker's son. You haven't told him about his past, have you."  
  
"I put him on the path. Logan's mind is still fragile," Charles says in excuse.  
  
"Is it. Or are you afraid of losing one of your precious X-Men?" Erik tries to smile again. Tries to remember how to keep the conversation in their usual vein of brotherly antagonism, but he can't quite manage it.  
  
And here he is, inside Erik's head, his familiar touch at last. Finally.  
  
"Erik, what have you done?"  
  
Erik wants to resent how easy it is for Charles to look inside him but he can't, not after Erik has betrayed so much in his turn. The smile falls off his face. "I'm sorry, Charles." His eyes fill with water but he doesn't blink. "I couldn't help it."  
  
"What have you told Stryker?" Again, why is Charles _asking_ him this, in a voice almost gentle. He could just take the knowledge out of Erik's head. But perhaps he needs to hear it confirmed out loud.  
  
"Everything." Erik says.  
  
He sees the holes in the glass wall start to vent some nearly colourless substance into the room. So this is how it ends. "The war has begun," he observes. Funny. He'd always thought he would be a participant, not the opening shot.  
  
"Help!" Charles is shouting, but it doesn't do any good, of course. He isn't supposed to survive this either. He's wheeled himself to the door of the cell and is hammering on the glass.  
  
Erik is suddenly fiercely angry. At Charles, at himself. "You should've killed me when you had the chance!" he shouts as the gas takes hold.  
  
Outside he can see Charles' boy, Cyclops, fighting with the guards and a woman who must be Stryker's secretary. Erik can dimly sense the metal inside her body - another mutant, then - but he can't reach it, not with the gas twining around his senses.  
  
Erik goes out like a light.  
  
*  
  
Erik opens his eyes and finds himself lying on the bed. No sign of Charles or his wheelchair, just an empty plastic corridor outside, stretching across to his cell for meal-time.  
  
Was that a hallucination?  
  
No, it can't have been. He _remembers_ Charles, remembers seeing him fall out of the chair onto the glass as the smothering gas came in. Erik remembers how disappointed Charles was in him.  
  
They must have taken Charles away somewhere. Is he still alive?  
  
Erik can feel the guard coming in from beyond the corridor. It's Mitchell Laurio. He puts down the plastic tray on the table and grins. "Have a nice sleep, Lensherr?"  
  
Erik can feel Laurio moving without opening his eyes. The guard feels more present than the rest of the room, more real than anything Erik's felt in months.  
  
He's full of metal.  
  
Laurio turns to go, smug with triumph.  
  
"There's something different about you, Mr Laurio," says Erik from the bed, smiling like a shark. He sits up.  
  
"Yeah," says Laurio, looking peeved, "I _was_ having a good day." He turns around to frown at Erik and yes, it's that look that Mystique's victims sometimes get. A little dreamy, a little dazed. Hah. That's his girl.  
  
"No. No, it's not that," says Erik, rising from the bed. He's filled with a wicked humour, suddenly.  
  
"Sit down," says Laurio.  
  
"No."  
  
Laurio takes out his plastic baton. "Sit your ass down," he threatens.  
  
"What could it be," Erik muses aloud, and then takes hold of the metal in Laurio's body. Yes. Ah, yes, it's everywhere in him somehow, insubstantial but possible to grasp. The guard makes a choking sound as he rises into the air.  
  
"What're you doing - " Laurio manages, as his toes scrape the ground.  
  
" _There_ it is," Erik says, triumphant, as he divines the metal spread through Laurio's veins, dissolved in him. "Too much iron in your blood."  
  
And he takes it out.  
  
To the shell of the man lying on the plastic floor, shirt spattered with blood, Erik says conversationally, "Mr Laurio, never trust a beautiful woman, especially one who's interested in _you_."  
  
Three beautiful spheres orbit above Erik's palm. They are the most gorgeous things he has ever seen.  
  
_'You could not do that,' says the father. 'Well, look at me now,' says the little girl, and she jumped into the well._

_The ship was dashed against the coast and broken into a thousand pieces._


End file.
